On Sun, 2024-04-14 at 15:11 -0400, Paul Koning wrote: > > On Apr 14, 2024, at 2:50 PM, Van Snyder via cctalk < > > cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote: > > On Sun, 2024-04-14 at 13:15 -0400, Paul Koning via cctalk wrote: > > > The printer I was describing sounds a lot like the Versatec ones > > > youmentioned, including the funny paper and smelly toner. But it > > > wasactually made by Varian, and the driver tells me it had 1408 > > > pixelsacross the width of the paper, so at 11 inches wide that > > > would makeit 128 PPI. I wonder if I still have a sample page or > > > two from thatprinter. > > > > American Geophysical had a fleet of trucks fitted with > > hydraulic"thumpers." They would go out to a potential oil or gas > > field, lay outa few thousand feet of cables with geophones on them, > > and drive aroundthumping the ground. Within the truck, they had > > Varian V70 computerswith microcode to do Fast Fourier Transforms. > > I remember a Varian computer sitting in a corner of a lab at U of > Illinois (computer science department). It looks similar to the ones > shown in Bitsavers but not quite the same -- it had a front panel > that had mostly brown coloring, and the panel was totally flat. It > used membrane pushbuttons for operation, with the button positions > marked by circles on the flat plastic front panel. > > Does that ring any bells? I remember being told it had user > programmable microcode, but I never used it, in fact I never heard of > anyone using it.
Varian bought Data Machines Inc, which had a computer called 620i. It fit in a 9U rack unit. When Varian built the V70 series, they fit in a 4U unit. Varian implemented the 620 instruction set, with a few extensions, in microcode ROM, and called it 620f. Writable Control Store (WCS) was an extra-cost option. WCS came in blocks of 512 64-bit words. I think three blocks of WCS could be added. My senior undergraduate project consisted of writing microcode for a V73 to implement the IBM 1130 instruction set. That fit in about 450 words. I did that because the University had replaced their 1130 with the V73, and then discovered that Varian didn't offer a COBOL compiler, and they wanted to continue to teach COBOL. As one would expect, I/O is quite different, and there wasn't room to do it in micocode in the one block of WCS they had bought, so two faculty members, Frank Kollar and Delmorris Blakely, both expert with IBM 1130 and V73, wrote I/O support that ran in 620f mode. 1130 support was put onto the removable paltter in the Winchester drive. A switch was added to exchange the "drive numbers" so the boot key loaded either VORTEX or the 1130 support, so COBOL students didn't need to learn how to use the VORTEX command shell. In the end, the V73 pretending to be an 1130 was up to thirty times faster. If anybody wants the microcode (and flow charts), I can send it. I never had the I/O support in electronic form, and I gave the listings to the Computer History Museum many years ago. Maybe Al Kossow scanned them, maybe not. Varian Data Machines was sold to Unisys, who pounded it into the ground.
